Essay in the Swedish weekly magazine Fokus, September 23, 2011.

 ISRAEL'S PERFECT STORM

On the narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the remains of past civilisations and communities lie in layers thousands of years old. Also the remains of the heavy fortifications and thick walls that once defended them. At some point in the future, the remains of the nearly eighty-mile-long separation barrier, largely an eight-metre-high concrete wall, built in the first decades of the 21st century by the State of Israel to protect itself from terrorist attacks from the occupied Palestinian territories.

What the wall proved unable to protect Israel against, and what the sometimes provocative construction of the wall (largely on Palestinian land and in violation of international law) possibly helped to accelerate, was the continuing weakening of Israel's position in the world and the strategic loss of allies and friends in the region.

The building of the wall was not directly related to any of this, of course, but together with the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on occupied land, it came to symbolise for posterity an Israel that believed it could defy and even politically humiliate its main allies with impunity, on the basis that the little strip of land between the sea and the river could at worst do without them.

As it turned out, it couldn't.

No, let's not get ahead of ourselves. The wall is still being built, as are the settlements. Israel is still the region's military superpower, nuclear-armed to boot. Most of Israel's alliances remain in place, at least on paper. The Palestinians may have their state recognised by the UN General Assembly, but Israel will continue to control and dominate every aspect of their lives.

In short, it is difficult today to imagine a scenario where Israel's existence is at stake.

At the same time, one after another of Israel's security policy pillars suddenly seems to be collapsing. The strategically important friendship with Turkey has quickly turned into something akin to open enmity, with Turkey's Prime Minister verbally ready to engage in an armed conflict with Israel over the naval blockade of Gaza, and with diplomatic relations between the two countries virtually severed. The external cause of the most recent and most serious rift has been Israel's refusal to apologise to Turkey for the killing of eight Turkish citizens and one US citizen of Turkish origin in the storming of the first Gaza flotilla on 31 May 2010, but beneath the surface a far greater geopolitical fault line is evident.

So, too, under the Egyptian-Israeli rift, which on the surface is about accidentally killed Egyptians and an inadequately guarded border and an inadequately protected Israeli embassy, but which deep down seems to be rooted in a tectonic shift of alliances and interests in the region.

And perhaps also in the rift that has opened up between Israel and most of the international community over UN recognition of a Palestinian state. The fact that the US will be forced to use its veto power to block full recognition in the UN Security Council, perhaps in open conflict with its NATO allies France and the UK, indicates that the Middle East power map is being redrawn. The political tsunami that Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak predicted would hit Israel as a result of UN recognition may already be underway. President Obama's former envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, spoke this spring of the risk of a trainwreck in the wake of the UN vote, which in this context means much the same thing: a development that no one can control - at least none of the powers that just thought they could.

The most visible sign of a wider geopolitical shift is the markedly reduced ability of the US to project power in the region. The two wars launched ten and eight years ago to both demonstrate and strengthen that ability, Afghanistan and Iraq, have both had the opposite effect. The war in Iraq has mainly strengthened Iran and the war in Afghanistan has gradually strengthened the Taliban and both wars have in many respects weakened the US. The revolt against America's most important ally in the region, Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, clearly took the Americans by surprise, as did the revolt in Libya, as did the uprising in Syria, as did the whole of the uncertain developments still referred to as the Arab Spring, over which the US has proved to have very limited influence.

What kind of states and alliances will emerge from this spring and its revolts no one knows yet, only that they will all reflect a changing balance of power in the wake of the US's strategic weakening and impending military withdrawal. As Israel now sees one after another of its regional alliances weaken or even fracture, it is fundamentally a consequence of the fact that these alliances have been based on a geopolitical map that is less and less valid. Turkey is increasingly seeking an independent role in the region, with unpredictable consequences not only for its ties with Israel but also for its ties with Europe and the US. Post-Mubarak Egypt is unlikely to remain the pliable security partner that the US once financed and built, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement now seems more written in sand than carved in stone.

Indeed, it is not even certain that the hitherto US-loyal Saudi Arabia will be able to withstand the winds of the Arab Spring in the long run, especially if the US persists in its veto of Palestinian UN membership. Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief and US ambassador, has in interviews and newspaper articles (including the New York Times, 11 September 2011) warned the US in no uncertain terms that its influence in the region would then be weakened, Israel's security undermined, Iran's power strengthened and the risk of war increased. He also predicts that under such circumstances, Saudi Arabia will no longer be able to maintain its "special relationship" with the US, but will instead be forced "by domestic and regional forces" to pursue a far more independent and active foreign policy. This would put Saudi Arabia on a collision course with the US in Bahrain, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, not to mention Israel and Palestine.

In short, what Turki al-Faisal wants to warn the US about is a dramatic loss of power and influence in the Middle East.

For Israel, the alliance with the United States has been the backbone of its defence and security policy ever since, two days before the June 1967 war, French President de Gaulle cut off military aid to Israel and French Mirage fighter jets were replaced by American Phantom fighter jets, and US strategic interests were quickly judged to coincide with those of Israel. After all, Israel's enemies, Egypt and Syria, sided with the Soviet Union in the Cold War and were thus also enemies of the United States, while America's most important ally in the region, the Shah's Iran, had close security co-operation with Israel. In short, what was good for Israel seemed to be good for the US.

Pretty soon the strategic alliance between the US and Israel took on an ideological and moral undertone, and in broad Christian circles also a religious one, with the result that the co-operation became increasingly immune to realpolitik and strategic considerations. The extensive military and economic aid to Israel, by far the largest per capita to any other country, has over time acquired an almost sacrosanct status in American politics. When two respected American scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, attempted to argue in a high-profile article in the spring of 2006 ("The Israel Lobby", London Review of Books) that the US's virtually unconditional support for Israel was not always and necessarily in the US's interest, they were met with outraged critics who labelled them both. Nor did they convince anyone, at least not in the US Congress.

The massive American support for Israel in turn strengthened the belief of one Israeli government after another that the alliance with the US was unconditional and that Israel could pursue virtually any policy with impunity. In May 2009, when President Obama explicitly and firmly demanded that Israel stop the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, the response was effectively a humiliating slap in the face (in the form of demonstratively authorised and initiated expansions), which did not prevent the slap-giver, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from receiving a standing ovation when invited to address the US Congress in May this year.

This remarkable unwillingness or inability of the US to stand up to Israel, even on issues where the US has openly expressed an opposing position and interest, has probably contributed more than anything else to Israel's almost demonstrable lack of initiative to bring about a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. Instead, the current Israeli government, strongly influenced by the extreme settler movement and radical nationalist parties, is pursuing a policy openly aimed at complicating and preventing such a solution. Never before has Israel had a partner for peace so willing to negotiate as in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his state-building Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, and never since the 1993 Oslo Accords has Israel had a government so unwilling to negotiate as the Netanyahu government.

This reluctance has been coupled with a conspicuous lack of interest in safeguarding and strengthening Israel's regional relations and alliances. The prevailing doctrine has been that ultimately Israel can only rely on its military superiority, that it can and must win all wars on its own, that its regional neighbours cannot be trusted, that the Palestinians cannot be trusted, that Israel must remain a fortress for the foreseeable future. It's a doctrine that basically says that if the world doesn't like what Israel is doing, it's the world's problem, not Israel's problem. Only Israel knows what is good for Israel.

What this Israeli doctrine rarely emphasises is the vital alliance with the US. It is as if, over time, the relationship between the two countries has become so all-encompassing, so symbiotic and so impossible to criticise that it is no longer perceived as an alliance but as a family relationship. When Israel claims to have only its own military superiority to rely on, it is a military superpower that is missing. That US influence in the region could one day diminish and the military superpower withdraw, redrawing the regional power map and leaving Israel in urgent need of new friends and alliances, does not even seem to have been a scenario in the Israeli government's imagination.

The Bible has much to teach about the inevitable and sometimes fatal importance of shifting alliances for the small strip of land between the sea and the river. The societies that have arisen here throughout history have all been characterised by their geopolitical vulnerability between much larger and more powerful and sometimes competing civilisations, and thus by their need to ally themselves with one or the other. The biblical prophets, forced to consider how even shifting alliances could not always prevent the conquest and destruction of the small strip of land, formulated for the first time in history the idea of a kingdom based on the justice of the weak, not the power of the strong; on moral rather than military strength. And thus, to use the terminology of our time, the idea of the importance of soft power versus hard power.

In the light of biblical history, hard power has not been Israel's best weapon.

And perhaps not in the light of the history being written now either. In any case, Israel's military superiority has not long been translated into strategic advantages. Ever since the ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Israel's wars have cost more than they have tasted. The war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 did not destroy Hezbollah as intended, but strengthened it. The war in Gaza six months later did not destroy Hamas as intended, but strengthened it. Both wars exposed Israel's growing strategic vulnerability to missile attacks.

What Israel will do with its military superiority at a time when regional powers such as Turkey and Egypt are turning from friends to enemies is difficult to see. The openly stated threat by Israel to go to war with the regional superpower Iran in order to crush its nuclear ambitions reflects in its military hubris the strategic dilemma of a state whose military strength will in the long run always be too small for its geopolitical surroundings. And which must therefore, perhaps more than any other state, cultivate the difficult art of forming and nurturing alliances and friendships. Not to mention the difficult art of moving from occupation to coexistence.

The phrase "a perfect storm" denotes an unlikely constellation of circumstances that dramatically combine to produce a disaster. In the film of the same name, it is literally a storm so improbable that no boat or crew is equipped to withstand it, including the crew on the boat of the film.

It is quite possible that the dramatic events that are now redrawing the political map of the Middle East will be described by future historians as Israel's perfect storm: the overthrow of Mubarak, the break with Turkey, the destabilisation of Syria, the change of power in Libya, the UN recognition of a Palestinian state, the strategic weakening and military retreat of the US, the political weakening and strategic irrelevance of the EU, etc.

However these events unfold and interact with each other, Israel has become increasingly dependent on circumstances over which it has less and less power. At least not the power based on the fact that the US would forever dominate the Middle East, that Israel would forever be militarily superior to its neighbours, that its neighbours would forever be held in check by compliant oppressive regimes, that the Palestinians would forever be occupied and stateless.

Certainly no Israeli government could have prevented the rise of Erdogan or the fall of Mubarak, just as no Israeli government can stop Iran's nuclear programme or the decline of the American superpower. What an Israeli government could have done, however, was to take initiatives to counteract and mitigate the consequences of such developments,

Instead, the Netanyahu government has consistently taken initiatives that have exacerbated them. The breakdown in relations with Turkey is marked by such initiatives, as is the breakdown in negotiations with the Palestinians, as well as the prelude to the upcoming UN vote.

"As if the crisis in relations with Turkey and the deterioration of relations with Egypt and Jordan and Israel's weakened position in Europe were not enough, Israeli government spokesmen are now trying to outdo each other with promises of a tightening of the occupation", writes the Israeli daily Ha'aretz in a main editorial (16. 9.11), citing as examples Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon's demand for the annexation of contiguous settlement areas and the demand of a close party friend of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Ofir Akuni, for the annexation of much more than that.

In the same newspaper on the same day, political commentator Doron Rosenblum writes: "Over the past three years, the far-right government has succeeded in undermining and unravelling every seedling of goodwill that ever sprouted in the US-Israel-Palestine triangle."

Nevertheless, in the run-up to the UN vote, several commentators have carried out the thought experiment that President Obama would suddenly and spectacularly surprise the world with the initiative to override his veto and support full Palestinian membership of the UN, explaining that this is only a logical and necessary step towards the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict advocated by the US, the EU, the UN and Russia (the so-called Quartet) and virtually the whole world.

In the thought experiment, such an initiative would overnight strengthen US influence in the region and revitalise the peace negotiations, mitigating the effects of the geopolitical power shift and nipping the perfect storm in the bud.

That such a scenario can only exist as a thought experiment and not as a realistic possibility shows, if nothing else, how improbably perfect the feared storm is likely to be. Above all, it requires that the two main players, the US and Israel, choose to shoot themselves in the foot, or at least act in a way that can only weaken their already weakened strategic and political positions.

Without this behaviour there is no storm, at best a stiff gale.

Ein brira, no choice, is a Hebrew expression that in Israel has come to express the almost mythological notion that the state of Israel has never had a choice, that the forces of history and the conditions of geopolitics have presented the young state on the narrow strip of land between the sea and the river with choices where there was only one choice to make and one way to go.

Like most mythological beliefs, it contains a grain of truth. Israel has indeed had many choices to make over the years, but most of them have been conditioned by external conditions and circumstances over which it has had no more than marginal influence. Again, it is not Israel's fault that Egypt and Mesopotamia are where they are, or that the Palestinians live where they live, or that the Middle East is a notoriously complex web of ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations, or that the American Empire is in decline.

But also because of this, the demands on Israel's ability to make the right choices and take the right initiatives in difficult situations are all the greater.

And the danger of wrong choices and wrong initiatives potentially fatal.